Robert Huot

LEADER and SCRATCH are extensions of Huot's early interest in minimalism. They are successful in reducing the number of filmic variables so completely that essential qualities and potentials of the materials of film can be felt. While SCRATCH is nothing more than eleven minutes of dark leader with a continuous handmade scratch, the resulting imagery varies a good deal, depending on how deeply Huot dug into the emulsion: when the scratch is shallow, for example, it seems to bead and move up through the image; when the scratch is deep, it seems to remain within the frame, vibrating horizontally.

“An extraordinary ebbing and flowing, dotting and pulsing ‘abstract’ field film. The filmmaker-painter Huot painted this film by spray painting a 12 minute length of clear film. When projected this single gesture contains a fascinating atomized space.”—Michael Snow

Zorns Lemma is a 1970 American structuralist film by Hollis Frampton. It is named after Zorn's lemma (also known as the Kuratowski–Zorn lemma), a proposition of set theory formulated by mathematician Max Zorn in 1935. Zorns Lemma is prefaced with a reading from an early grammar textbook. The remainder of the film, largely silent, shows the viewer an evolving 24-part "alphabet" (where i & j and u & v are interchanged) which is cycled through, replaced and expanded upon. The film's conclusion shows a man, woman and dog walking through snow as several voices read passages from On Light, or the Ingression of Forms by Robert Grosseteste.

A section from ROLLS: 1971, which I feel stands well on its own. The continuous field of falling snow appears to break into three planes or zones of different density and speed. I think of Snow in some sense as nature's answer to SPRAY. - Robert Huot

"Beautiful Movie" is a filmic cameo during which a passage of blue film leader and clear film painted red introduces a lovely image of a woman, naked from the waist up, sitting on a brass bed, combing her hair. When we first see the woman, she is well out of focus, but during the following minute or so she slowly becomes clear. As soon as the image is completely clear, however, Huot dissolves to an image of himself sitting in a similar position, combing his own hair. This image quickly goes out of focus, and the viewer sees the original passage of leader and painted film, this time in reverse, forming the other half of a filmic frame. "Beautiful Movie" is a quietly feminist work; Huot revised the traditional tendency to worship female beauty by suggesting that, yes women are lovely, but there is no physical reason why men cannot be lovely in the same way.—Scott MacDonald, “The Films of Robert Huot: 1967 to 1972”, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, Summer 1980.

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Costumed Capers...Fetish and Fantasy...Punk Pleasure...a must for those who enjoy erotic humor.

Film by Robert Huot.

A punk spoof with music by Georg Deitl, lyrics by Robert Huot, performed by George A and The Super Connie featuring Bobby Beethoven. Plus electronic music by Brendt Conrad. Starring the beautiful Ama Zeena and sinister Dick Darth.

By 1968, Huot had begun to use photographic imagery, fusing his continuing concern with minimalism and an interest in the erotic. RED STOCKINGS is a demonstration of the power of a single frame of photographic imagery. Except for one frame, the entire three-minute film is a continuous, uniform red which creates a variety of afterimages and other optical illusions. When the lone frame flashes by halfway through the film, the imagery is difficult to identify, but it has a somewhat erotic quality which, when I first saw the film, sent me to the rewind. I scanned the red until I located the frame and discovered an image of a naked female crotch. The title clarifies the erotic joke, which, however, exists only if the viewer is willing to examine the film closely enough to be sure of what is there.

Two reels projected simultaneously, with slight variations in speed.

One Year (1970) is a series of forty-nine rolls of 16mm film, nearly all of them unedited except in the camera, and all of them silent. The flares at the beginnings and ends of the rolls are not eliminated and, as a result, become a form of visual punctuation. The rolls are arranged so that, as title implies, we move gradually through an entire year, from winter to winter. The most interesting aspect of the overall organization, however, involves the fact that the first quarter of One Year (1970) is very different from the final three-quarters: this change reflects a fundamental alteration in Huot's approach to film.

The motif of having people slowly approach the camera first appears in Nude Descending the Stairs, an interesting minimalist work made up of three single-take, single-angle black and white silent rolls during each of which one person - in one instance, Huot dressed in a white painter's jumpsuit; in the others, a naked woman (Marie Antoinette) - slowly descends a four storey staircase toward the camera. Because of the camera's upward angle, the descents are translated into level forward motions during which the two people grow larger with each step they take. The film's concern with the manipulation of space and with the details of human motion through it, accounts for both the title and the inscription 'for Duchamp and Muybridge.

Film by Robert Huot.

Dark, Scenes from the Barn superimposes bucolic barnyard activities with jarring images of hidden desire

Super 8 diary film by Robert Huot

The Super-8 films include some of Huot’s most impressive filmmaking and some of the most impressive Super-8 filmmaking I’ve seen anywhere. Ironically, the handling ease and lower expense of the smaller gauge have resulted in finished films much less personally revealing than the earlier 16mm diaries and much more consciously directed toward audiences: for example, what sexuality we do see in the recent films is in the nature of performance; often Huot and his wife, painter Carol Kinne, design environments, costumes, and sound tracks for comic, pixilated sexual escapades. The Super-8 films continue to reveal Huot’s life, but there is no longer the sense of personal investigation evident in Rolls : 1971. In its place is Huot’s pleasure in recording the beautiful and enjoyable elements of his life and sharing them with viewers.

In this "fourteen-part drill for the camera," Frampton created a portrait gallery of his art-world friends engaging in a variety of ordinary activities.

In CROSS-CUT--A BLUE MOVIE, Huot presents a minimal passage of intercutting between found footage of a hoochy-coochy dancer and a blue leader, organized as a pair of inversely related geometric progressions. The resulting film is amusing (because of the pun in the title, the speed of the editing, and the funny fast-motion shimmy of the dancer); highly rhythmic (both because of the intercutting itself, and because of the rhythms added by the dancer's movements, the flutter of dust particles on the blue leader, and the waver of scratch marks on the footage of the dancer); and formally interesting because of Huot's creation of a montage which so energetically goes nowhere.

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